Volume X, Issue 21
October 27, 2021
Word of the Week: lifeboat
Dear ,
I hope today has had moments of beauty, moments of joy, moments of love . . .
I've spent my day on the Blue Ridge Parkway with my friend Nora, whom I met when we were 17-year-old waitresses together at Elby's Big Boy Restaurant in Erie, Pennsylvania.
From 1978, when I graduated from college and moved to Charlotte, until 2012, when Nora moved from Landisburg, Pennsylvania, to Cody, Wyoming, we met once a year at Otter Creek Campground on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Buena Vista, Virginia, each of driving halfway, for a weekend of camping and Scrabble, along with plenty of beauty, joy, and love.
And what a joy it is, now that I know how to hitch up, unhitch, and pull our 22-foot camper, to be camping together again on the BRP!
We're celebrating both of us turning 65, me on November 1st and her in April of 2022. How sweet it is, truly. (And, yes, we are still playing Scrabble.)
So today, I'm reprinting the Word-zine from March 7th, 2016, which seems pretty appropriate on the cusp of a big birthday. One last thing— thanks to my dear friend Bridgett Langson, author of the very adorable children's book Finding Home, My Arf-O-Biography, I have resumed my Tag, I'm It practice of recording, and savoring, the best moments of my days. In my "great slump of 2021," noting what I had to be thankful for, what I can acknowledge myself for, and the gifts that brightened my hours fell by
the wayside. It's made such a difference to be doing this again that I'm offering it to you, and all my Word-zine readers, at a big discount. See below for more details. And thank you for being "here"—reading these words.
Okay—time for some time travel back to March of 2016, writing prompt and all . . .
You, like me—like all of us—have had some extraordinary, and even ordinary moments, moments worth rescuing from oblivion. And I hope you, which I stumbled across this past week as I was searching for a file. It seems pretty appropriate as I will. Because while I would love for you to live forever, that's not the way this whole being human thing works.
I'm so aware of that right now, as today, March 7th, sits about halfway between my mother's and my father's birthdays, and they've both been gone a number of years now. I can't help but miss them, and I wish they'd written down their extraordinary moments for me, my siblings, and our children and grandchildren. It's too late now, though I've done my best to record the stories they told
me—those that I remember—as truly as I could.
It's important to honor the things that have happened to us that made us laugh, made us weep, made us know beyond all doubt that something eternal glistens from the far side of the life we know here on earth.
Maybe it's because my dad was in the Coast Guard, and I grew up with the windy, wavy vocabulary of rudder and tack, "ready about" and "helms alee" that I like to think of every meaningful personal story written down as a passenger that's been set into a lifeboat, so that it continues after the ship goes down.
What events, what moments of yours deserve to be set into a lifeboat of words? Below is one of mine. And below that is your opportunity to save important moments of your own.
Love and light,
Maureen
TAG, I'M IT! 65th Birthday Celebration Sale!
Both the year-long TAG, I'M IT! (on sale for $16.65) AND three-month TAG, I'M IT! (on sale for $6.50) offer—in no more than five to fifteen minutes—a simple way to recap and celebrate the very best of each day of your life. The practice of writing out your “T’s” (things you’re thankful for), “A’s” (actions you can acknowledge yourself for), and “G’s” (gifts you’re grateful for) is a transformative one, especially combined with the final step, I’M IT!, in which you intentionally choose three do-able,
most-important-to-you actions you’ll take the next day.
The TAG, I'M IT! journal grounds you in two important habits: keeping your focus on appreciating and celebrating the good in your life and intentionally accomplishing what matters most to you. You’ll also create a record of
your most meaningful, happiest events and experiences.
Start your journal—or restart, if needed—whenever you like. (Though a new year is a perfect time!)
An introduction with tips and ideas will help you make this practice your own. Soon, you’ll notice that you’re living your days with more joy, presence, purpose, and intention.
WordPlay Featured
Writing
Gift
by
Maureen Ryan Griffin
“You will receive a gift,” the workshop leader tells us. We do not know what it will be, nor when it will arrive, but at some point during this afternoon, as we
explore “How to Have an Inner Life that Supports Your Outer Life,” the gift will come. Our chairs form a circle around a candle, a small fire to connect us to all human beings who have gathered for all time around a center of light and warmth to share their stories. We share our own to form this community of souls on this particular day – why we have come, what is in our hearts.
“This morning,” I say, when it is my turn, “I got an email from my father telling me that they were calling in Hospice for my mother.” Hospice. A clean-to-the-bone word, shocking despite the fact that we have known, my four siblings and I, that our mother’s disease is terminal.
Of course, I’d thought as I read his words, I couldn’t attend this writing workshop, even if I had been looking forward to it for months, even it was being led by one of my writing heroes, Christina Baldwin, a forerunner in the field of journal writing whose Life’s Companion is one of the most dog-eared, well-worn books on my shelves. Not only was I numb with grief, but I
also had to prepare for a 600-mile trip to my hometown for an indefinite amount of time. There were items to pack, care arrangements to be made for my children, appointments to cancel.
But I believe in the power of the word, don’t I? I have always said that writing was a medicine for times such as this, and so I
have come anyway. And after we have wound our way around the circle, cast our stories into the flame, Christina gives us a very simple, meditative exercise with which to begin: Close your eyes. Take a deep breath – a reminder to be in your body. Open your eyes. Catch an image. Let go. Write 5 minutes. This will be, she says, “most delicious if you have no idea what to say.”
My eyes rest on a tree outside the window. Yes. My pen meets paper here. I have always liked being outside more than in, from the time I was a small girl who loved the small woods behind her backyard more than her house.
And this thought turns into words
about the times I have fallen asleep in the dark in a place I’ve never been before. There were a number of these on the whirlwind, three-week trip from Erie, Pennsylvania, to San Francisco and back when I was 22.
I remember being lulled to sleep by the Green River, which I could hear but not see. And later, there
was a bed and breakfast in Bath, North Carolina, which I didn’t know overlooked the Pamlico River until daylight, when I looked out my bedroom window. I practically ran downstairs with my journal, stopping to grab a cup of coffee on my way out to the bench that beckoned below a willow right beside the river. Sunlight rippled. What delight.
But, oh, the best of these morning surprises was most definitely the one on the 52-hour Greyhound bus trip I took a few years before my cross country adventure. I was 20, on my way to spend the summer in Flagstaff, Arizona, with my oldest brother, who was going to graduate school there. I had never been to the Southwest. I fell asleep somewhere in Kansas with my face against the bus window, and awoke to the sight of the sun rising over red rock country – a sight so
foreign and so beautiful that I gasped out loud right there in my seat, awestruck by this new landscape. And as I wrote about this moment, out came the words, “This is what it will be like for my mother.” There it was, my gift from the retreat.
I carried this gift with me up three long, rainy highways, through the
mountains and two tunnels, into the room where my mother lay asleep, her breathing supported by oxygen. It lay with me on the two chairs pushed together into a makeshift bed that I took over from my sister. It carried me through the next days with an easy grace, this certainty that my mother would soon be filled with that joy.
~ Maureen Ryan Griffin, September 28, 2010
WordPlay Now! Writing Prompt
This is WordPlay—so why not revel in the power and potential of one good word after another? This week, it's "lifeboat."
PROMPT:
Make a list of the moments in your life (or your character's life) that you want to preserve, in other words, "lifeboat" moments that you don't want to go down with the ship...
Pick one, and write it out. Revise if you care to.
Over the next few days or weeks, keep adding to your list as experiences you want to preserve come to you, and get them all safely written and saved.
MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold,
a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and two collections of poetry, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water. She believes, as author Julia Cameron says, "We are meant to midwife dreams for one another."
Maureen also believes that serious "word work" requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best learn—and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her clients along the way. Language, when used with intentionality and focus, is, after all, serious fuel for joy. Here's to
yours!
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